How Do I Love Thee

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"How Do I Love Thee?" Elizabeth Browning wrote 44 sonnets to express the courtship between herself and her husband-to-be, poet Robert Browning. She named this series as Sonnets From the Portuguese, the title based on the pet name Robert gave her: "My little Portugee". While writing her sonnets, she had two types of sonnet formats as: Petrarch’s Italian model and Shakespeare’s English model. She chose Petrarch's model to write Sonnet 43 “How Do I Love Thee”. The poem, "How do I love thee" is a passionate affirmation of love from Elizabeth to her lover Robert Browning. In this poem, Elizabeth declares her spiritual and pure love for Robert and describes the many ways in which she feels for him, and therefore defines her love. On the poem she express three different ideas of love which are the depth of her love, an attempt to describe the indescribable, and the comparison to known feelings and interactions. Sonnets like “How Do I Love Thee” have fourteen lines with a specific rhyme scheme and meter. An iambic pentameter is the meter used for this sonnet. An iambic pentameter is ten syllables, or five feet, per line with five pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables, as lines two and three of the poem demonstrate. This poetry format is originated in Sicily, Italy, in the 13th Century. Generally, the theme of a sonnet is love, or a theme related to love. The rhyme scheme of “How Do I Love Thee” is as follows: Lines one through eight ABBA, ABBA; and lines nine to fourteen CD, CD, CD. Petrarchan sonnet first eight lines are called as an octave; the remaining six lines are called as a sestet. In Elizabeth Browning's "How Do I Love Thee" the octave draws relationship between the poet's love and religious and political ideals; the sestet draws relationship between the power of love she felt while writing the poem and the power of love she experienced earlier in her
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